Managing Expectations (or: You Are Not Entitled to My Labor)

Bailey reflects on organizing, boundaries, and when to tell people to stfu.

People like to take advantage of organizers.

Organizing teaches you very quickly that people do not think about labor unless they are forced to. Not because they are inherently cruel, but because our culture (queer culture included) treats care and emotional management as…background noise rather than work. If something exists, it must have been easy to make. If someone is responsive, they must have time. If you care enough to do it once, you must be willing to do it forever.

I’ve noticed lately that this dynamic is especially pronounced in queer spaces, where “community” is both a shared value and a kind of moral leverage. Requests (though they feel more like demands) arrive framed as inevitabilities. Organizers become assumed infrastructure, despite the fact that we’re often unpaid. We stop being people and start being surfaces onto which needs, frustrations (double down on that), and urgency are projected.

What often goes unnamed is that this is still exploitation, even when it comes wrapped in progressive language.